The Advice My Mother Gave Me That Prepared Me for Life
So like most of us, we’re given little tidbits of insight along our journey. Some serve us, guide us, and help shape our path. The not-so-helpful stuff we can let drop away.
And then there’s the advice that sticks.
The kind you feel immediately. The kind that has weight. The kind that shapes you.
That’s the advice that gets us through. The advice that gives us strength and brings out our inner warrior. Those are the insights we must hold on to. Grasp. Run with.
And this is the greatest advice I was ever given.
The Words That Shaped Me Early On
This advice truly shaped me and prepared me for life. It gave me a deeper understanding at a young age. It gave me a sense of awareness that helped ward off disappointment when times got tough.
It gave me confidence and resilience. I understood this was the nature of things. And I felt grounded in that knowing.
So the greatest advice I was ever given was not a sweet sentence meant to ease life.
The greatest advice I was ever given was not soft-spoken words that were easy to digest.
The greatest and best advice I was given — advice that served me and helped me cope with life, all of the ups and especially the downs — was this:
“Life is tough. You have to be strong.”
A Tough Mother With a Tender Heart
It was that. Literally those eight big little words were instilled in me from the time I was a child.
My mom was a strong woman who had overcome massive pain. She lost her mother at a very young age, among other hardships.
It was the pain of losing her mother that forced her resilience to emerge. She had to forge ahead and keep going. Eventually, she stopped looking out the window waiting for her mother to come home.
Eventually, she knew she’d have to dry the tears and move on with her life. She learned this at a young age. That tragedy made her tough as nails early on.
She took trauma and turned it into strength and resolve.
I had the good fortune of having a tough mother who made me tough.
Learning to Keep Going
And I can tell you, life has required a great deal of toughness from me.
Trauma after trauma hardened and strengthened me in a way that allowed me to keep going.
Our options are few.
Keep going — or don’t.
There really isn’t another way.
The beauty of my upbringing is that I was taught to be strong by a very strong woman with a very tender heart. Tough didn’t mean closing your heart. It meant feeling the feelings and then moving forward.
It meant never closing yourself off to life because of hardship.
Strength Without Bitterness
Don’t let the tough stuff make you bitter. Let it make you stronger and wiser — but keep your heart soft and tender.
Life is precious and loving just as much as it is hard and demanding of grit.
When we’re down and out, we usually want to hear, Oh, I’m so sorry. I hope it gets better. That’s awful. I wish I could make it easier. You poor thing.
And as much as we want to hear this and stay in some state of victimhood, it’s not what we need. It doesn’t serve us.
People feeling sorry for us may feel comforting in the moment — and we’ve all wanted that — but it never truly makes us feel better. It perpetuates the pain and keeps us stuck in sorrow and victimhood.
The Truth We Need to Hear
I’m not here to detract from pain or grief, which I believe are very necessary to build resolve. But at some point, we need someone to say:
Well, that sucks — but that’s life.
To some extent, we need to hear it.
“Life is tough. You have to be strong.”
This is what I needed to hear.
Why This Truth Changed Everything
Hearing this as a young person gave me a deeper understanding of life. So when hard things happened, I wasn’t stunned by the reality of suffering.
I may have been traumatized. I may have been reeling with grief and despair — that’s human. But I wasn’t confused by the fact that life was hard.
That knowing allowed me to go deeper.
It made room for acceptance.
I knew this was the nature of life. So instead of asking why is this happening, I wanted to understand what the lesson wasin each trauma.
“Life is tough. You have to be strong.”
There’s something profound that happens when this truth is instilled in you by your mother. I truly believe I got through everything I’ve been through with some level of understanding and grace because I was given this teaching early on.
The Peace That Comes With Acceptance
This has been the greatest advice ever because it taught me a great lesson:
Yes, life really is tough.
Yes, it can truly suck at times.
But that’s life.
I feel incredibly lucky to have been given this perspective early. It toughened me up for things I couldn’t have imagined surviving.
Trauma so horrid it’s hard to fathom — unnatural death, physical assault, illness, betrayal, and more.
That’s life. It’s full of ups and downs.
And I think it’s only when we truly get this — in a deep, wholehearted way — that we find peace.
Life is not peachy-keen, happy-go-lucky fluff.
It’s the school of hard knocks.
We are here to learn and evolve. And while life can be really awesome and filled with highs, it will always include lows, challenges, and struggles.
In my understanding of life, this is karma. These are our lessons. This is why I don’t believe in just one life and why I believe in reincarnation.
We don’t all have the same experiences or lessons because we are all working through different karma and soul evolution at different stages.
Knowing early on that life would be hard helped immensely. And even if this realization comes later in life, it softens the blows in a deep and profound way.
